halcy 
a common affordance in scifi is that spaceships can just video call each other, even spaceships of different races who have never met before. this implies that there is a sufficiently mathematically obvious RTC protocol that all spacefaring races eventually discover
„but halcy, the computer simply adapts the signal“ try piping an opus bitstream into chatgpt, see how that goes
„This situation where everyone uses their own protocol is ridiculous.“, says Alien A, „We shall develop one protocol that satisfies everyones ne-“ and before they can even finish, they are handed The Document. No one remembers where it came from originally, what the letters „XKCD“ mean, or the significance of the number 927
bluestarultor@halcy Maybe the systems are just banking on everyone having figured out some product of primes and the systems sling a ton of zeroes back and forth until they figure out a common one and then things get all weird for a few frames until it can figure out the light and dark sums of channels as things move around in the hi-res signals and then try to figure out the rest based on how many channels there are.
Meeting a new species is understood as everyone waving their arms around a bit and being weird and purple for a few seconds and then everyone just pretending it never happened. XD
CavyherdI would love to see the VFX implied by this. Some skiffy production should really have a go at it. It'd be a marvelous opportunity for some stealth math education.
(Why does Darmok suddenly leap to mind?)
@cavyherd @halcy I feel like "Darmok" failed to anticipate Wikipedia. As a writer with some sci-fi in the works, it's reasonable to expect anyone with interstellar travel down is going to have a digital encyclopedia. Leeloo uses this method in The Fifth Element to rapidly update herself on everything leading up to her breakdown over learning about war, but it's a solid tactic. And something analytical A.I. would actually be good for to rapidly identify parallels in language. I mean yes it would burn down a forest, but if you can start with some concept of, say, "dog," you have domestication, carnivores, pets, friendly behaviors, probably agriculture, etc. Building that web would get you started on basic concepts. Would it be rough? Absolutely. But it would be a start.
My reference to Darmok is less about the story element of the language decoding than the way the story is structured to bring the audience along while the characters work out the puzzle.
Structuring a story to display the process you describe in the 1st paragraph of the reply I resonded to could be a lot of fun for at least one episode. (Though I imagine subsequently it'd just be implicit, in the way the transporter was first introduced, & then later just assumed.) >
There are a lot of critiques that could (& have been) made about the primary conceit in Darmok.
But as a piece of story-telling that also carries the viewer along through the experience of solving the puzzle, I found it to be a delight.
@cavyherd Ah, yeah, now that you spelled it out I see exactly what you mean. XD
Oh grumble. Now I really really wanna see somebody do that.
I mean, I love the comms hook-up conceit, but it'd be so much fun from a production standpoint to play with that.